


The Nameless City

by byzantienne



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 14:29:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Lalonde, seer and servant of the Furthest Ring, has a possessed radio, fifteen minutes of missing time, and a conversation to have with the Witch of the Fens.</p><p>This will entail taking the subway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nameless City

**Author's Note:**

  * For [somniferumKore (soglideaway)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soglideaway/gifts).



_**i. woke up afraid of my own shadow  
like, genuinely afraid** _

There is nothing to be done about the dress. Rose discards it on the kitchen floor like a shucked and sodden cornhusk, where it makes a limp puddle spreading delicate red tendrils out along the groutlines in her tile. A sufficient quantity of blood ceases to smell of anything but a dull salt leavened with an edge of rot. She passes her hands inquisitively along her naked arms and sides, leaving unfortunate streaky handprints. The great majority of the blood is not her own.

This is, on odds, less reassuring than it could be.

She is barefoot and the tile is tacky-cold when she pads to the sink. Her sponge has most recently been used to scrape oily residue off a baking sheet. It leaves grimy streaks in the red on her forearms. _Bluh._ After she's clean enough to get up the stairs without tracking bloodspatter on the carpets, she is going to take a shower long enough to use up all the hot water on the entire block. She hasn't managed to get the taps to run cold since she moved down to the city; it will take concerted effort.

Rot, salt, and the shadows in the corners of her kitchen – mid-century renovations on a brownstone's pre-war skeleton, stainless steel appliances installed new, charmingly warm and inviting recessed lights – shifting at the edges of her vision. Flickers and tides, an onrush of grey. Her tongue is thick in her mouth. There is a pounding in her head, like an afterimage of a particularly inferior dubstep rave. If she strains herself she can nearly make out the lyrics.

 _Rose,_ they say. _Rose, Rose, Rose._ They are not inventive lyrics, but she knows them well.

Her skull feels like a stretching soapbubble. Something would like to come through. She bends over the sink and expels the contents of her stomach onto the sponge in ropes of colorless bile. 

She is missing around fifteen minutes of subjective time. Someone has broken her wards and scrawled a gate in blood all over her front stoop. The last thing she concretely recalls was turning the corner, a plastic bag of groceries in one hand, and catching sight of the squiggling loop of glyphs, all _red._

_Rose._ The shadows at her feet heave, a gentle readjustment. If she measured, the angles of her perfectly-laid tile would be off by some indefinable degree. She wonders what she's done with the groceries.

She screws her eyes shut and stabs blindly with her palm for the radio on the counter, twists the volume dial as high as it will go. The radio shrieks to life in a cackle of static, a scratched-record noise that screeches _TH1S 1S R4D1O FR33 3UROP3!_ before subsiding into the hiss and pop of an unused channel. The electric hum of the lights dims and returns. The blood on the floor smells more of blood and less of brackish water. Distantly, through the static, Rose hears the radio kick back onto a beat closer to the stuttering of her own heart. _M1SS L4V3ND3R P4ST1LL3,_ says the radio, _YOUV3 GOT 4 B4D C4S3 OF TH3 GR1MD4RK P4SS3NG3RS!_

"Thanks," Rose says. Her voice is, to her surprise, quite even and impeccably sans impronouncable syllabics. "That was clear before I consulted my possessed radio. Have you any advice or should I turn you off?"

_POSS3SS1ON 1S N1N3 T3NTHS OF TH3 L4W and the remaining tenth is kinda busy, Lalonde, so do your special sorceress schtick and shut down the shitshow –_

The radio had come down with her from the crumbling hulk of the house Upstate, along with a trunk full of grimoires and whatever else she could easily throw into the back of Jade's pickup. The grimoires provide Rose with a basis of income: a surprising number of cityfolk, troll or human, are willing to pay for a seer's guided tour of whatever future the Old Gods have lined up for them. The radio is more – personal.

Personal, and also flagrantly rude. The _special sorceress schtick._ If it _insists._

Salt water drips gently down the carpeted staircase behind her and pools on the floor. It meets the edge of her dress and shades a delicate, spreading pink, like it is drinking up the blood. Water hasn't run down the stairs of her brownstone before. She thought she'd left that behind. This house isn't haunted.

_snap out of it, you planning on getting chewed on by a fuckton of yonic tentacles or what_

Perhaps a person can be haunted instead.

"No," she says. "Have I told you lately that you're not helpful? For an oracular device, your suggestions are both pedestrian and pornographic." She presses her palms against the cool marble of the countertop. It helps a little. It grounds her. She tries to remember, for the thousandth time, who had given her the radio, and when.

_i aint any kind of oracular device –_

_B3 QU13T! P1CK 4 FUTUR3 4NY FUTUR3._

Her wards are down, and resetting them would trap her inside with whatever many-mouthed creature of the Furthest Ring is trying to crawl inside her skin. Rose listens, and selects for brute force.

In the blind core of her is the memory of a sun she knows she's never seen. She imagines the branching of a lightning-strike, each fork determined by the smallest variations of atmospheric pressure. Rose Lalonde is a seer as well as a sorceress, and the function of a seer is –

(The function of a seer is to be a pilot and a drawlight. She remembers the unfurling paths between the stars – )

The function of a seer is to _choose._ The hungry pressure in her skull burns, as if it is an ant and she is a lens held up to the light. It burns and lessens and whispers _Rose, you promised,_ chidingly.

When she opens up her eyes, she is alone and naked in her kitchen, which needs scrubbing and possibly sanitizing. Her groceries are on the island, still in their bag. The house creaks around her, and settles.

 _MUCH B3TT3R!_ chirps the radio. _yeah. that took long enough._

She flips it off. And then she turns it off. 

She's going to have to do something about this.

* * *

Out of a mild concern for personal safety, Rose waits until an entire hour past sunrise to head out into the city. The light is winter-thin and chilly, and by its illumination the gateway smeared onto the stairs in front of her house is a dull and flaking rust. She kneels, licks the pad of her thumb and rubs a bit of it free. It smells of iron, which implies human, not lowblood troll. There's enough of it that there should also be a body, but none is immediately apparent. Several unsavory possibilities suggest themselves: the pleasant option is a corpse tossed in the dumpster around the corner.

There is only one person in the city besides herself who Rose can imagine having a vested interest in turning her perfectly nice uptown brownstone into a portal to realms beyond mortal understanding. For the past three months she has been steadfastly ignoring her, on the policy that she herself is a relative newcomer and that good fences – and healthy respect for anyone else who can talk to the Most Near of the Furthest Ring and remain possessed of an unliquified cerebellum – make good neighbors.

Putting her wards back up is going to take all week, and she can still taste brine when she isn't actively thinking of not tasting brine. _Good neighbors_ is no longer a going concern. Rose straightens, turns up the collar on her jacket against the chill. The short hair on the back of her neck prickles softly against the leather. 

She is seeking the Witch of the Fens. This implies taking the subway.

Her local subway station is a nexus, three stacked layers of tunnels, express and local in both directions. It is also decrepit as hell. A fair mix of trolls and humans all in dishwater-dull business gear are ignoring the thick scent of urine and the graffiti scrawled over the missing tiles in the wall. They deliberately un-notice Rose and she neglects to pay them any attention in return. City etiquette is as elegant and complicated as anything out of the Regency novels she misspent her adolescence devouring, but at this hour of the morning it boils down to maintaining the polite fiction of solitude in the face of an entire lack of personal space. 

On the opposite platform across the tracks, a lanky troll in ratty, polka-dotted pants nonchalantly shakes a can of spray-paint. Rose watches him contemplate the station wall as if it holds deep mysteries. Someone has tagged it already; there's a long cephalopodic coil smeared in inky black waving its way across it, complete with a cheerful calligraphic _ia ia._ The troll cares not at all for this effigy of some close-drawing god: he squints, steps back, and takes aim, painting over it a clown-face in four drippy indigo strokes: slashes of eyes, a round nose, a grin. Rose flinches to look at it. There are Mirthfuls in the city, but very few are as brave as this one, who has technically just committed blasphemy. Any watching agent of the Everliving Condescension would take him in for culling – 

He turns, and catches Rose in the action of breaking the commuter's law of mild indifference. His eyes are the same indigo as his paint. He winks.

The roar of an approaching train drowns out the punitive surge of the tide in the back of her skull. She lets it swallow her with the rest of its passengers.

* * *

She is all the way downtown when she finally gets off. The last passengers trickle up the stairs and back into the brighter world; Rose waits until they have vanished and then swings herself over the side of the platform and down onto the tracks. Her feet squelch in the thin layer of rotting newspapers and other urban detritus, and she wrinkles her nose. She tightens the strap of her messenger bag across her chest, and ducks into the darkness of the tunnel.

The squelching rapidly gets worse after the great metal tracks of the subway rails curve away to the left towards their ultimate railyard destination. Rose bears right. Her direction is the harbor and the lowlands that lead down to the sea; the tunnels that will take her there are older and meaner than the ones bored out of the city's bedrock by trollish granite-eating machines. Before long she is up to her ankles in sludgy refuse and tidal backwash. When the dim light of the station behind her finally gives out, she digs in her bag for her knitting needles, slipping one free and thereby frogging several rows of a doomed shawl. It sparks to fitful glowing life in her fingertips, and she holds it like a candle.

The walls down here ooze condensation and the ghosts of hundred-year floods. The high-water mark is a foot over Rose's head, a scraggling line of greyish green. When the ocean arrives to reclaim the city, this is where it will come in. 

She doesn't have a map; to be more precise, she doesn't believe a map of these tunnels exists for her to have. Instead she gets deliberately lost, wanders in a loose circle through the muck, and follows her own sense of growing unease. The water on the floor slops against the walls with each of her footsteps. Slowly the last traces of urban understructure give away to a subterranean warren that stinks of seaweed. The low ceiling begins to glow with bioluminescent slimes, fuchsia and violet and translucent white. Something scabrous and lacking legs brushes by her ankles under the water, and Rose chokes back a shriek. She points her needle-light at the retreating lumps of its back, bares her teeth in a hiss, and blasts it with violet fire. It shrieks like she didn't, and goes still.

When she picks her way slowly by its melon-sized head, she sees its jaws are lined with inward-curving fangs. Its eyes are blind and mottled. She leaves it behind.

Eventually the tunnels spill her, spotted with effluvia and damp to the skin, into a great cavern with a low, brackish lake in the center. She can hear the beat of the harbor-tides like a giant heart. In the back of her skull, where she still feels open and raw, there are flickers of whispering, a tongue she feels she should know and can only remember when she is asleep. The cave is lousy with numinous portent. All of Rose's instincts as a seer and sometime servant of the Furthest Ring sing for her to get down on her knees and raise her palms to the black spaces between the distant stars in praise.

She rolls her eyes and walks down to the shoreline. When she kneels it is only to dip the remains of her knitting in the water and try to use the damp mess to clean off her jacket.

A single sharp point presses into the base of her head, the soft place where her spinal column turns into her skull. She freezes. A drip of water falls from her sleeve into the lake and the sound is achingly loud.

"You don't wanna even think about movin, pinkskin seer," says her assailant. 

Troll voice; _seadweller_ voice, the labiodentals all approximated.

"Whatever will you do if I consider it?" she inquires.

"Ain't gonna think twice about blowin you to bits for tresspassin, for starters."

"The object you have pressed into my neck is awfully small for a firearm, I'm afraid." Rose lets the knitting fall from her hands into the water with a gentle _flup,_ and holds her empty hands up where the troll can see them. She'd rather have her needles, but strictly speaking she doesn't require the tools of the trade.

"I got plenty of firearms," the troll says, with no small amount of petulance. "Some as big as you, even. Don't need 'em for a little human girl, come down under the city all alone –"

"What is it that you are about to blow me up with, then?" Rose asks.

Her nose floods with the lightning-scent of ozone, a chemical burning white that makes her eyes water and her skin go to shockflesh. The backs of her hands flush grey-black, helplessly instinctive, as if she was being injected with squid ink.

The troll laughs. It is a bright and delighted sound, and very young. "Wand," he says. "Science wand. It don't like you much."

"No," Rose says, "it wouldn't –"

She dives forward into the lake in one convulsive push, kicking out behind her as she goes. She aims her heels high, and is rewarded by the soft give of gills under a thin shirt and her assailant making an anguished grunt. The water smacks her across the face and she goes under. The lake is deeper than she'd thought. When she sputters to her feet she's barely three feet from the shoreline and up to her hips in it.

The troll on the shore is reedy and tall, wearing a poet's blouse of a shirt and an entirely absurd scarf tossed dramatically back over his narrow shoulders. His earfins are large and flushed violet and his teeth remind her of nothing so much as the beast she'd killed in the tunnels – an eel's maw, lips curled back angrily from needle-fangs. The science wand in his fist is impossible to look at, a white discontinuity. It crackles.

It occurs to Rose that she is facing down a seadweller while standing in his natural habitat, and that she oughtn't even let him get his purple-Converse'd feet wet. 

She lifts her hand and calls the crawling dark from the lake.

The liquid shadows come easy, spread through her and coil in heaving masses towards the troll on the shore. He fails to succumb to horror. He lives down in the dim; his eyes are a fishy mirror-sheen as he raises the science wand and meets her tendrils with a blaze of purifying fire.

"Ain't gonna be so easy," he yells, and Rose grins back at him. It is a profound relief to give in to the power of the Furthest Ring, to charge the cavern with the boiling inhuman darkness that has been trying to take up residence in her mind. She sends a tendril to curl around his throat, pressing his gillslits shut, just to watch him pry at it with the hand that isn't flaying her alive with white –

"Eridan!" someone shouts. " _Stop that right now!"_

He does, all at once. Rose gasps, staggering. The water laps at her, silken relief. Her opponent struggles inside the shadows she's thrown around him, trying to sip at the air through his mouth, his gills fluttering under his shirt desperately.

"You too," says the voice, "Put. Him. Down!"

The Witch of the Fens was a troll girl once. The bones of her remain; she is fine-wrought in porphyry and steel, draped in gauzy rags, water-sodden. The loops of her hair hang heavy. They writhe. Her lips are white. Her eyes, white. Her teeth are a grinning-skull mask of razors.

She has her hands angrily propped on her hips, as if the duel between a scion of the Furthest Ring and a misbegotten servant of scalding antiseptic power was a playground squabble. She pouts, the fishbelly-pale inside of her lower lip visible even in the gloom. She is also wearing a pair of swimming goggles.

Not without regret, Rose coaxes the excrescence of the dreaming dark away from the seadweller – Eridan's – throat. He flops unceremoniously and awkwardly to his knees.

"Fuckin hellspawn sorceress human _bitch –"_ he spits.

"At your service," Rose says.

The Witch smiles, a dizzy flash of razors. "Be nice," she says, as much to Rose as to her servant. She comes up to the edge of the lake. Rose cannot see her feet; she is not sure she possesses them. Perhaps she is only the suggestion of coils, dripping, a hiss of deep water on rock. A lesser woman would get the fuck out of the water. Rose – ( _has been worse things in her time_ ) – hasn't come this far to be cowed by a bog-wraith in the shape of a seatroll, even if her height and her horns are a match for every propaganda poster of the Condescension herself. 

She pulls herself upright, her jacket slopping soggily against her sides. "Good afternoon, sea-witch," she says, "I'm Rose Lalonde."

"Ooh!" says the Witch, delighted. "Yes! Yes, you are! That's fintastic. I'm Feferi, if you don't remember." Then she pauses. "Um. Why are you down here?"

Rose extends one hand, points it at Eridan. Crackles of violet light spark between her fingertips. It is at the moment difficult to cease calling up the grimdark forces. The cavern does not help. "If you'd like to keep your servitor breathing, I'd suggest – _nicely_ – that you tell _me."_

"I seariously have no clue!"

The Witch of the Fens, death-hag, Heiress, the Scion of the Emissary and the representative of the Imperial interests of the Ring – she makes _fish puns._

All despite herself, Rose finds this adorable.

She trails her fingers in the water, allows the ultraviolet fire to spread slowly over the surface. "I'm a Seer," she says, "amongst other things, and someone is trying to let the Furthest Ring through my wards. You're Their power in this city – so you tell me why I'm down here, Feferi."

"I didn't let Them in! They were already here." Feferi bends down and cups the fire and the water in her palms. It clings like ink to her claws and harms her not at all. Rose feels the touch like a distant spasm of electric heat.

"She's stuffed full of horrorterror, Fef," Eridan says, surprising Rose by being both verbal and on his feet again. " _Somethin_ happened to her, I coulda burned her to a crisp without even tryin, with the wand."

Rose arches an eyebrow at him. " _Could_ you have."

"Probably!" Feferi says. Eridan veritably _preens._ "But I've got nofin to do with it."

"Who does," Rose says.

Feferi shrugs. Her clavicles are coral accretions at the base of her throat. "I know who we could ask, Rose Lalonde, Seer-amongst-other-things. But you'd have to come with me." When she grins Rose can see that her tongue is a black prehensile spear. "And I'm not shore what'd happen to you, where we'd be going!"

"I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself," Rose says.

"Do you promise?" the Witch asks.

_(Will you promise, Rose? We have promised you a reward; promise us in turn.)_

Rose opens her mouth. "Yes," she says. It is not a word in English. It bubbles.

Feferi claps her hands together. "That's so great! We're going to go to Midtown!"

"Aw, fuck," Eridan says. "Not _him."_

The Witch flutters her tongue at him, _phbbt._ He blushes so hard Rose can see it in the dark.

**_ii. the manhattan valleys of the dead_ **

They make an unlikely trio of tourists. Rose half expects Feferi to dissolve in smoke if the sunlight hits her, but when Eridan leads them out of the tunnels and into the frantic spin of bodies that populates what is left of the theater district after the trolls cleaned it up, she remains entirely solid. She looks like nothing so much as a teenager in sclera contacts and goth makeup. Rose has been that teenager, and not very long ago either.

Feferi walks quickly, weaving in and out of the crowds with a huntress's practiced grace. Rose can just nearly keep on her tail. Eridan stalks beside her, a sneering majordomo out of a play. There is never any more nor any less than a foot of space between him and his mistress. Watching them, Rose expects them to touch. They do not; they are ostentatious in not touching.

By the time they break free of the crowd and emerge into the silvery canyons of midtown proper, it has begun to rain. The sky is lit from within with pink and yellow and palest cream-white; the rain is a rain of light. Rose has never seen anything like it. Where it falls on her face she feels distantly warm. Eridan scowls and turns up his collar, hunches his shoulders as if water was an affront and not a habitat.

The skyscrapers here are shards. They rise from the sidewalk like the broken-off ends of bones, the splintered carcass of a city-size ship reconfigured for office space. When the trolls had come down to the city they had dismantled the shell of their arrival, and then also dismantled enough of downtown to put it back up again. None of the resulting architecture is human enough to make Rose sanguine. She does not, as a habit, walk in this part of town alone.

The Witch stops their little procession at the front of the second-tallest building in visible range. It is a graceful hulk, gunmetal-sheened and slick with rain. The lobby doors are glass, and they open via touchpad. Feferi places one grey thumb on the machine and it lights up fuchsia. They are admitted without concert or fanfare. The lobby itself is marble shot through with spacecraft-metal, with a resulting effect that Rose can only label as _poststructuralist Art Deco._ Some trolls, all tealblooded or even more rarified shades, mill about with absent purpose. Rose had been under the impression that the Witch of the Fens was somewhat of a trollish celebrity, or at least a trollish nightmare, but the lobby denizens do not even acknowledge Feferi or her companions.

In the elevator, Feferi punches the highest floor.

"At what point do you reveal where it is we're going?" Rose inquires. "I'm only content to be the callow adventurer on her way towards ordeal and transformation for _so_ long, you realize."

"Navigation and communications!" Feferi says cheerfully, at the same moment that Eridan says, "A fuckin graveyard."

Rose nods. "How enlightening. Do go on."

The elevator doors chime, and open onto something which is neither.

It is a hollow heart of a room, cavernously high, its ceiling an improbable dome. The remains of alien machines grow from the floor without understandable pattern. Every one is dark and dust-covered. Some list. Lichen creeps up their sides. The rounded walls are hung with tapestry rags, nothing more than gold thread holding together scraps faded to an unrecognizeable dull pink. Behind them, metal glistens dully. 

Rose revises: it is a graveyard. It is the death of flight, torn out of the belly of the colony ship and abandoned here like a cauterized tumor.

In the dimness, Feferi glows like a blacklight beacon. She picks her way across the floor, stepping lightly over fallen panels and the broken-glass skeletons of communication screens. She moves as if she knows the way. The shadows do not part for her as much as they deepen.

"Come on!" she calls. "He's right over here!"

Rose abandons Eridan by the elevator, where he scowls and paces and refuses to come along. There are no tracks in the dust save the ones her own feet make; the Witch's passage leaves no trace.

Hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room is a dead nest of cables and cords, an excrescence of shipstuff that emerges from the ground and extends, columnal, to the roof. Half-devoured by it is the desiccated corpse of a troll. His face is the only undistorted part of him. All the rest has become the ship, and died when the ship died. 

"That's a Helmsman," Rose says. "Why is it still here?"

Feferi tilts her head. Her eyes flash white, mirror-sheens. "The Empress built a city from the ship. What else would we do with him?"

The helmsman's eyes are hollow sockets, blind long before he died. His horns are a crown, a double pair, one large one small, and wired into the ship. Feferi reaches out a fingertip and touches one high cheekbone. 

"Think of your question!" she says to Rose. 

Rose wonders if she could have avoided this entire expedition by asking the radio instead, but the radio would likely have devolved into a mixture between _Cities in Dust_ reruns and incomprehensible babbling in verse again. A dead ship is, in a sense, easier to deal with.

The point where the Witch is touching the helmsman glimmers into light, a hazy tyrian glow that sinks inward, sliding under its thin-stretched skin until it emerges again through the empty eye-sockets. It spreads into the coils of the ship and leaves them pulsing with sourceless life. When Feferi pulls her hand away a tendril of fuchsia follows her finger. It drips as if it was liquid onto the floor and shatters.

The helmsman gasps. His lungs rattle. His eyelids pull open onto pits, one white and one black.

"Fuck," he says.

"Hi!" says Feferi, as if she was greeting some school-friend on the streetcorner instead of a newly-resurrected corpse. "Nice to sea you again!"

"Like hell it is. How long did you manage to stay away this time, princess?"

"Mm. We've got a question for you. I think it's a good one!"

The helmsman turns his head, all of the fractional range of motion that he possesses. Rose meets where his gaze would be. There are bright psionic sparks inside his skull. She can see all the way into the black of it.

"Where's the douchebag?" he asks. "This one's different."

"I left him sulking by the elevator," Rose says. "I'm Rose."

"You're the one with the question."

"In a manner of speaking."

"You're not going to like the answer, I can tell you that for free."

"I haven't even asked you yet."

"I've got the voices of all the dreaming dead screaming at 150 decibels every time I'm awake, Rose Lalonde." He jerks his chin up into a self-deprecating grin. "You let FF bring you up here, you get what she pays for."

Feferi gently winds her fingers in the dark hair around his horns. "He's reely good at prophecies of doom," she says.

"Very well," Rose says. "Prophesize me this. What does the Furthest Ring want with me now?"

His lips curl thinly back from his teeth. "They're curled up inside your thinkpan, grimdark girl," he tells her. "They've turned your blood into fucking ink and brine. What do you think they want? What they've wanted since the beginning. Someone to allow them access."

Rose swallows. "Tell me who broke my wards and let the Furthest Ring into my house?"

"You did," the helmsman says.

Over his shoulder, Feferi's smile is all needle-teeth.

**_iii. fate don't fail me now  
(we were wasted waiting for a comedown of revolving doors)_ **

Her brownstone is nestled securely between the others on the block, stately and unremarkable save for the non-Euclidean lean of the iron railings up the front staircase and the flaking crusts of human blood. In every other respect it is as familiar to Rose as her own skin. She'd chosen it, bought it – she does not precisely recall the realtor – had there been a realtor? – retiled the fucking floors and lived in it like a snail whorled in a shell. The scent of brine wafts to her from halfway down the street and the windows are lit from within with an eldritch gleaming that looks just like Feferi's eyes.

The Witch of the Fens reaches out and pats Rose on the shoulder encouragingly. Where they touch Rose is shudderingly, intoxicatingly cold. "Go ahead!" Feferi says. "It looks like a reely pretty hive, if you get the Ring out of it."

They'd left the helmsman dead in his nest of cabling. He died slow, but fast enough to watch. Feferi had touched his cheek again and he'd withered, starving in the carcass of the ship that was his body. Then they'd all taken the subway uptown.

"Not planning on coming with me, then," Rose says. It is as much a stalling tactic as anything else.

Feferi shakes her head. "They'll like me too much," she says. "It'd be a party! Take Eridan instead, the Ring doesn't like him even a _bit._ "

Rose thinks of the science wand, its burning angel-light. "Don't try to blow me up, princeling," she says to Eridan. 

"You ain't worth explodin," he says. His collar remains popped and his hands are jammed in the pockets of his skinny pants. 

"Such confidence," says Rose. He follows her with the science wand already drawn, like she was as much threat as her house. If the helmsman was correct, he isn't wrong.

The doorknob is ice. When she turns it her fingers go nerveless and pale. It opens with no resistance.

Beyond, her front hall is a gulf of measureless stars. They streak as if Rose is on a fast-moving meteor, hurtling at unimaginable speed. The spaces between them bubble like tar. Heaving shapes press through, cephalopodic and vast, a thrash of strangling limbs. Dimly from the interior she can hear a high, clear music, a violin playing an augmented scale. She thinks of drowning, and thinks better of it.

"This is overtly hadeopelagic," Rose says. The wind whips her voice away. 

"No fuckin kiddin," says Eridan. He actually sounds impressed.

She takes a step over the threshold. Tendrils of blackness wrap secure around her ankles and her wrists in loops of chill. Under the violin is a rattle of insistent drums. Rose, the Furthest Ring whispers. She lets them lead her in. Where her feet fall the ordinary wood flooring warps. Her mouth is slick with saltwater. Eridan steps where she steps, and she can hear the hissing where the starlight strikes his skin and boils. He makes no sound.

Rose considers, with absent interest, if it causes him pain. She turns to ask.

Instead of words, her mouth fills and spills over with liquid. It drips down her chin. Rose notices that when a seadweller blanches, he turns the color of frostbite. She scrubs the back of her tendril-cuffed hand across her chin, and it comes away covered in black ink. She turns her hand in front of her face, curious. The ink slides thickly off and vanishes into the roiling dark.

"You got a clue where you're goin, Lalonde?" Eridan asks.

 _"Down,_ " Rose says. More ink escapes the corners of her mouth. 

The stairs to the kitchen were not this long before. Rose has been going down them in an endless and featureless descent. Somewhere beneath is the radio and the blanched-coral heart of the house. The helmsman, before he died again, had warned her.

The side of the wall bulges obscenely, a waterlogged plaster maw. The chains of shadow around her limbs pull her close. On the other side is a colorless infinity. The Ring waits there. _Rose. Emissary. We made you a promise. We made you a world – lead us in –_

Eridan's arm straightens. Something tears.

She feels, briefly, the white splinters push inwards as the whip strikes, and then there is only a lessening; the coils slide and unfurl, and she is falling, almost. The absence hits harder than she would have thought. For a moment she thinks she's been put down, somehow, like a rabid dog, but realizes dimly she has been freed. The strike has broken her fetters. An immaculate shot.

She loses track of where he is, after that. She doesn't know and she doesn't care. What matters is the intuition: she gets the hell out of there, away, running from something from which there can be no escape. Her knees skin on the floorboards as she scrabbles to stand, drunkenly lurches away from the writhing mass of tentacles rearing behind her. They're regrouping. There's nowhere to go.

Running down the hallway is a little like falling. It's not to the door. She's going to the kitchen. The counter next to the sink. The radio sits there curiously unaffected, as out of place as it always was. Big. Old-fashioned. Untouched. Her fingers slip on the dials, fingers finding them like groping for a key. The tendrils are behind her, and once they touch her she will be taken by them entirely and splendiferously and for ever.

The radio blares like a hymn:

_WAKE ME UP BEFORE YOU GO-GO  
DON'T LEAVE ME HANGIN' ON LIKE A YO-YO_

_this is TZ-100,_ a voice crackles, _where the music straight up fucking sucks btw my co-host is just one giant goddamn floppy tongue but don't touch that dial_

_also if youre a disgusting pile of tentacles from the outer reaches YOU H4V3 TO H4V3 4 P3RM1T!_

The flagella still beneath the kitchen door. They pause with Rose in a strangely Mexican stand-off, her heart hammering in her chest.

 _rose_ says the radio, more gently now. _this isnt happening_

Clearly, it _is_ happening. Suckers lave the underside of the doorjamb. They mouth the air, making wet sounds on her floorboards.

 _TH3 PR1SON YOU H4V3 M4D3 FOR YOURS3LF 1S 3XTR3M3LY 1MPR3SS1V3,_ says the co-host, _BUT YOU ONLY 3V3R M4D3 1T YOURS3LF!_

She waits, backed up against the countertop like a frightened serving girl. The lappets do nothing. They squirm, anticipatory.

The radio is no longer soft with static. It's as though she's hearing it from someone standing right beside her. "This shit hurts just as much as you let it," the voice says. "Masochism is some boring stuff if you're also the sadist."

Beneath the crack between door and floor, the darkness fragments. The light behind them is a little orange, a little fluorescent. There is a crack there, if only she could see it. The movement is getting sluggish.

"Please don't tell me that the secret was in my heart all along," she says out loud, startled by the trembling in her voice.

The radio blares, _NO!_ \-- _nope_ \-- in double voices, and the second says sharply: "No. Just your head."

Waking up happens all of a sudden, like awareness of a hangover or a loud noise. 

The dreambubble peels away like a dead skin. Around her the walls of her room in the meteor stand dark and silent and uninfested, just walls, no vermin. Her limbs are her own limbs. Everything is quiet save the sound of the oxygen recycler doggedly sucking in carbon dioxide.

The remains of the dream shatter like the starlight. She is already starting to forget.


End file.
